Films featuring
James Cromwell

Murder by Death

Murder by Death

No pulse, no heartbeat. If condition does not change, this man is dead.

This is Neil Simon’s attempt to do a Mel Brooks number of the genre of detective fiction and it’s probably for the best that he tackle it, because I think that the director of Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety would have wielded too blunt an instrument to make it work. Even with Simon’s slightly more sophisticated touch, Murder by Death is comedy in broad strokes, but even if you’re not a fan of murder mysteries, enough jokes score to make it a diverting 90 minutes.

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Spider-Man 3

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While I would never knowingly recommend either of the two Joel Schumacher Batman movies to you, gentle readers, I think either of these two brain-dead cinematic exercises would be instructive to those responsible for Spider-Man 3. It could have helped them avoid that dread affliction known as elephantiasis of your villain roster. It’s what happens when you have three (or more) antagonists for your comic book hero to fight, fatally diluting the threat that any one of them poses. A quick review of Superman Returns might have also warned them of the dangers of dwelling too much on your hero’s girl troubles. Yes, Peter Parker’s relationship with Mary Jane is major part of the Spider-Man mythos, but there is such a thing as balance and this movie does not achieve it.

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The Queen

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The Queen is the story of the near-eternal struggle between tradition and modernity. The bare plot outline of Stephen Frears‘s thoughtful portrait of Great Britain in the throes of that struggle probably does not excite the casual moviegoer, but this quietly engrossing drama is anything but dull or sedate.

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I,Robot

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I, Robot was a series of stories by the late Isaac Asimov about a future society where robots serve humans and are governed by the now immortal Three Laws of Robotics.

  1. A robot will never harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot will always obey the commands of a human, except where those orders conflict with the first law.
  3. A robot will preserve it’s own existence, except when doing so would conflict with the first or second law.

These laws became so famous within the science fiction community that if you wrote a story with robots, you were in danger of being bombarded by letters from outraged 13-year-olds if your robots didn’t obey Asimov’s Three Laws.

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